The twenty poems that make up ‘Fantasy Railway Station’ were written in Chinese and re-created in English by Lijun Nie, Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Public Administration at Yunnan Minzu University, China.
Dr Nie, a scholar of Chinese art and literature, completed her doctoral-level study of Chinese minority ethnic art in 2016, using an ethnographic approach to the understanding of art production and use in Yunnan province, south west China.
In January 2020, Dr Nie arrived at York railway station to take up her post as academic visitor at York St John University. Soon after moving into her studio flat in York, there was a national lockdown, the third phase of which is ongoing. Still in York over a year later, Dr Nie has kept in touch with her family, and with her colleagues and students at Yunnan Minzu University, via daily online video calls. She has continued to research, present at international conferences, and teach.
In parallel with these activities, she has written the twenty poems published here. The poems are both a reflection on, and an outpouring of feelings about, the experience of coming to York, on lockdown, and on the losses and gains that are part of separation from loved ones.
Dr Nie’s son, aged twelve in 2021, has provided the illustrations for the poems. These illustrations are photos of a large-scale mural that he has been drawing, in pencil, on a wall in their family home, since the age of four. The illustrations show inter-connected landscapes and structures, and complement the themes of mapping imagined relationships, travelling in space and in mind, and the questions about belonging, that we see in the poems. There is a transgressive energy and a response to constraint, in the poems and in the drawings.
Bishopthorpe Road Books 